DevExpress Takes over Development of the Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit

Microsoft can only do so much. That's the feeling one gets, as the company nearly cops to being busy in other fairly significant areas of its business (Visual Studio 2015, obviously, but then there's the upcoming Windows 10). Case in point: "It's been 15 months since a significant update was released for the AJAX Control Toolkit on CodePlex," Jeffrey T. Fritz said in a blog post. "In the time since then, our friends at DevExpress have stepped up and offered to lead this open source project."

That's right. Rather than put development of the AJAX Control Toolkit on hold even longer, Fritz said that development has been headed by its close partner and Microsoft controls builder. DevExpress, in fact, took over the reins around September 2014, and it released a new version, dubbed 15.1, that consists mainly of features and updates to stabilize the release.

A blog from DevExpress Web Program Manager Mehul Harry (which, we're fairly certain, is not related to Microsoft's Brian Harry) said there were more than 2,000 issues that destabilized the product. "So the first job was prioritizing them and solving the major blocking ones (in the end, totaling nearly one-third of those 2,200)," he wrote.

Besides those fixes, Harry said that the installer had been streamlined, supported more modern browsers and now is able to work with Visual Studio 2013 templates. The toolkit now also contains one assembly that supports all versions of the Microsoft .NET Framework newer than version 3.5, and code deemed useless has been pared from it to streamline it.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is simply a library of controls that works on top of ASP.NET AJAX, which developers can use to build client-side Web projects based on HTML5 and CSS. You can get more details on the Toolkit from Mehul Harry.

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